Incas, we actually find Mama and Cora (Demeter and Kore) as Goddesses of
the maize (Acosta), and for rites of sympathetic magic connected with the
production of fertile harvests (as in the Thesmophoria at Athens) it is
enough to refer to the vast collection in Mr. Frazer's "Golden Bough." I
have also indicated the closest of all known parallels to the Eleusinian
in a medicine-dance and legend of the Pawnees. For other savage
Mysteries in which a moral element occurs, I have quoted Australian and
African examples. Thence I have inferred that the early Greeks might,
and probably did, evolve their multiform mystic rites out of germs of
such things inherited from their own prehistoric ancestors. No process,
on the other hand, of borrowing from Greece can conceivably account for
the Pawnee and Peruvian rites, so closely analogous to those of Hellas.
Therefore I see no reason why, if Egypt, for instance, presents parallels
to the Eleusinia, we should suppose that the prehistoric Greeks borrowed
the Eleusinia from Egypt. These things can grow up, autochthonous and
underived, out of the soil of human nature anywhere, granting certain
social conditions. Monsieur Foucart, however, has lately argued in
favour of an Egyptian origin of the Eleusinia. {82}

The Greeks naturally identified Demeter and Dionysus with Isis and
Osiris. There were analogies in the figures and the legends, and that
was enough. So, had the Greeks visited America, they would have
recognised Demeter in the Pawnee Earth Mother, and Persephone or
Eubouleus in Chibiabos. To account for the similarities they would
probably have invented a fable of Pawnee visitors to Greece, or of Greek
missionaries among the Pawnees. So they were apt to form a theory of an
Egyptian origin of Dionysus and Demeter.

M. Foucart, however, argues that agriculture, corn-growing at least, came
into Greece at one stride, barley and wheat not being indigenous in a